Our Q+A with Vanessa Otero

We caught up with the founder of media watchdog Ad Fontes and creator of the Media Bias Chart ahead of the election to discuss news ratings, trust in the media and “junk food.”

Leading up to the 2020 election, we’re putting out a special interview series in which we’ll talk with leading experts about misinformation, censorship, fact-checking, and plenty more.

For the final installment, we (virtually) sat down with Vanessa Otero, the founder of Ad Fontes Media, Inc., and creator of the Media Bias Chart. She’s a patent attorney by day, but her work with Ad Fontes has taken off as more people find themselves looking for credible sources and information they can trust amid an increasingly daunting infodemic.

Here’s what she had to say.

JM: You are the CEO of Ad Fontes Media, which you started in 2018. You created the Media Bias Chart, which is essentially an easily digestible news rating system that places major media outlets on a spectrum based on the reliability and political bias of their reporting. Where did you get the idea for this chart, and why did you feel it needed to be made?

VO: I made this in the run up to the 2016 election, so it’s been almost four years since I put out the first version of it. I was just thinking about my own news consumption habits and the main driver of it was seeing how people would fight and argue with each other about political issues on Facebook, in particular. People across the aisle from each other would share links to something from The Blaze or Vox and it would never be persuasive because they would just dismiss it as biased or fake news. And it was just really ineffective. There are sources that are biased, but to varying degrees, and others that are more reliable and less reliable. But there are really just differences and gradients.

I’m a patent attorney by profession. I explain complicated things using words and pictures. And pictures really help people understand stuff. And so I did this as a hobby because I’m a big nerd and making a picture of the news sounded fun to me. I spent a few weeks researching based on my own experience and reading some other samples of media I was unfamiliar with and I laid it out visually, put it on the Internet and it went super viral and I had no idea that it would do that.

I have to imagine you ruffled some feathers with your placement of certain media outlets. Most every publisher believes that they’re a reliable source. They’re not going to openly admit that they’re a part of the misinformation problem. So how would you describe how the chart has been received by those in the media?

I got a lot of opinions about it, especially with the first one I did. I was flattered that InfoWars, which is kind of notorious in the bottom corner of the chart, took offense and made their own version of the chart and they were at the apex of it. No matter if it was bottom left or bottom right, you’d have people defending it, as if sources that only publish content that’s accurate one-third of the time were unfairly placed [on the less reliable side.] Even today, we have tons of data on it and a really robust methodology and multiple analysts, but it doesn’t ever reflect the ratings of one individual person because everyone has their own unique biases and their own unique sample of the news universe that they’ve read in their lifetime.

One thing I really like about this chart is that the “overall news source scores” are generated based on scores of individual articles. And then those individual articles are rated by at least three human analysts who self-identify as being right-leaning, center, and left-leaning. Given that many news reporters struggle to separate their biases from their reporting, do you think it would be in newsrooms’ best interests to adopt a similar approach in their hiring practices? Is that something that could help restore trust in the media?

It’s possible. I have a lot of faith and optimism in how our political journalism and how our discourse can be. I’ll be on a Zoom shift with the analysts I work with, rating an article, and often just right off the bat, everyone will say “this is a left-leaning opinion,” and everyone has similar scores. And sometimes, there’s divergence but after talking through it, we often coalesce, even if it’s not 100 percent and we will see each other’s reasoning.

The challenge is different for different types of news outlets. There are outlets who are trying to be unbiased, and there are outlets who are trying to be biased. For these news outlets that want to have high levels of trust, that might be useful practice to implement at least within the newsroom that is reporting the hard news. It would help if they at least ran their news by someone else on staff with a different viewpoint. If you’re left-leaning and you ran your article by someone who’s center and right-leaning, they might be able to spot certain things in your language selection that aren’t as down-the-middle as you think it should be.

I think another way to increase trust is to limit the amount of opinion they run. I don’t really think newspapers really need to be in the opinion business anymore because the entire internet exists for other people’s opinions.

Given you’re an expert on media bias, we’re curious — where do you usually read your news? What are a couple of sources you trust the most?

I tend to rely on the organizations that have the most journalists, so those include the wire services like Reuters and The Associated Press. The reason they’re able to syndicate so much content is because they have thousands of reporters on the ground around the world. Most local, longstanding publications that have a solid number of journalists in their newsrooms, those are usually more reliable. My news habits involve using the apps for those various news sources and actually actively going out and visiting their websites because you’re not going to get that balanced stream of content in your newsfeed.

Do you suggest that people steer clear of more biased reporting altogether or is a little bit of “junk food” OK every now and then?

Yeah, I think that’s our whole analogy is that junk food is like junk news. Most of us are consuming junk news all day and not realizing it. I’m talking about analysis and opinion heavy content that has spin. There are some cable news networks that live in that space, which is a shame because they do have news divisions and reporters that work really hard to publish really important stories online, but people will just kind of settle in and watch a few hours of cable news. You can watch cable news for four hours, and only hear four news stories. That’s less useful. There are some folks that pay no attention to their news habits, and they will just get sucked into their information silos, their filter bubbles, which are mostly fed by social media so the only information they’ll see is from four or five media sources who are all one-sided. So they have very little insight into why anybody could possibly believe anything different to what they believe.

Interactions with content from fake news publishers on Facebook have more than doubled since 2016, according to a study from the German Marshall Fund? Why do you think it’s exploded the way it has in such a short timeframe?

The polarization is this self-fulfilling cycle. When you have algorithms that are optimized for engagement, there are a few things that engage people a lot. One type of content is the funny stuff, the cute stuff, the heartwarming stuff, the cat videos and the like. But the other stuff is content that makes you angry. People like to engage in the arguing, the name-calling. And in certain settings, the more you engage with polarizing content, the more polarizing the similar content you get. The rabbit hole effect on YouTube has been studied a lot. “You like this? Here’s a more extreme version of it.”

And our own elected officials are subject to the same polarizing influences as ordinary citizens. You can imagine if you’re a senator or a congressman or the president, you often appear on partisan media. You talk to people who agree with you and validate your point of view. So it’s polarized our elected officials as much as our electorate.

A survey from the Knight Foundation revealed that four in five Americans are concerned misinformation will influence the election. Given that we’re in the home stretch of election season, what can people do to guard themselves and their networks from any last-minute disinformation campaigns?

I think the biggest thing is, when something pops up in your social media feed, you’ve got to ask yourself whether it’s true. And check. You’re already on the Internet. Google is one tap away. Too many people take that step and say, “I’m not really sure if it’s true, but I’m going to share it anyway.” Don’t do that. There’s no need for you to spread it if you don’t know.

We don’t all have to be our own individual fact-checkers. We don’t have the capacity or wherewithal to verify to 100 percent degree of certainty whether something did or didn’t happen. But we’ve got this really robust news media ecosystem that we can rely on that’s full of people who are in better positions to know than we are. So if something pops up on your feed that seems shocking or surprising, just Google that exact topic and see who else is reporting on it. If you don’t see anyone else who’s corroborating that report, it’s best to reserve your judgment and say it’s probably not true unless I see it reported elsewhere. That’s the most valuable thing we can do. Don’t just get your information from a post or a meme that you see on Facebook, Twitter or Youtube.